David Brussat: Driehaus laureate’s work of revival

By David Brussat

Thursday

Dec 12, 2013 at 12:01 AM

A tribal king of ancient Britain, Caractacus, stands captive in Rome and, in Robert Graves’s “Claudius the God,” declares: “I cannot understand, my Lords, how as rulers of a City as glorious as this is,...

A tribal king of ancient Britain, Caractacus, stands captive in Rome and, in Robert Graves’s “Claudius the God,” declares: “I cannot understand, my Lords, how as rulers of a City as glorious as this is, with its houses like marble cliffs, its shops like royal treasuries, its temples like the dreams that our Druids report when they return from magical visits to the Kingdom of the Dead, you can ever find it in your hearts to covet the possession of our poor island huts.”

Rome in A.D. 46, at the conquest of southern Britain by the Emperor Claudius, was indeed a majestic city. But in time Rome fell, Britain rose and, on Dec. 2, Pier Carlo Bontempi won the Richard H. Driehaus prize for classical architecture awarded by the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame.

The Italian is a native of Fornovo di Taro, Parma. He teaches architecture at Florence University and designs it elsewhere in Europe and in North America, but mostly in the countryside and villages of Italy. For inspiration, he looks unabashedly to classical Rome.

Rome is not alone in having risen only to fall and rise again. The Driehaus prize hit a low point two years ago when it was given to postmodernist Michael Graves. Last year, the Driehaus jury turned toward redemption by celebrating the highly stylized classicism of Chicago architect Thomas Beeby.

This year, the prize goes to the more polished canonical classicism of Bontempi, completing the Driehaus resurrection.

Rome saw its classical monuments rise and subside into ruins. In the Dark Ages its classical treasures became a bargain basement for builders, only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance, bedecked again by beauty and venerated for centuries — until recently.

Mussolini embraced a fascist early modernism in Italy but postwar administrations have kept it and its increasingly garish successors outside the gates of central Rome. Postwar barbarians have sacked the sprawling suburbs of Italy instead. Against this backdrop Rome has arisen by, in effect, standing still. It stands tall amid the vandalization of the ’burbs, where the likes of modernist Zaha Hadid roam free.

It is in the countryside and suburbs of Italy that Bontempi has largely made his mark.

“In Italy, for 3,000 years we [built] a fantastic masterpiece formed of the fusion of architecture and landscape,” Bontempi told Kim O’Connell in the February 2007 issue of Traditional Building magazine. “In the 60 years following World War II, we [did] everything to destroy that masterpiece with the aid of buildings alien to tradition. Unfortunately, we still live in a postwar atmosphere, both of widespread desire for obligatory novelty at all costs and of amnesia with regard to our great qualities in the field of urbanism and architecture.”

Architecture today has a fat and frankly very stupid line separating the idea of what is creative from what is not. To contort the upward thrust of a skyscraper as has never been done before is mere novelty. To shape the curvature of the turn in a balustrade so as to catch the sunshine for a longer part of the day is creativity. To recapture a true sense of the creative, we must train ourselves to appreciate subtle gestures no less than bold gestures.

Bontempi understands this perfectly. His urban work fits seamlessly into its context but his suburban work might be said to challenge its context. It does so in a positive way explained by Steven Semes, a professor at Notre Dame and former head of its school of architecture's Rome program. His book “The Future of the Past” (2009) deconstructs today’s architectural orthodoxy of inserting modern architecture in historical settings. Intentional contrast, Semes says, is actually more appropriate in modernist settings. In short, the rollback of modern architecture must begin somewhere.

“The fact,” Bontempi says, “that almost all of Italy’s cities and towns possess intact historic centers represents both an advantage and a disadvantage. While they provide excellent models for traditional urbanism, they also mitigate the ugliness of the suburbs, thus reducing the potential motivation for architects and planners to compensate for that ugliness.”

Pier Carlo Bontempi — a name as beautiful as his work — clearly requires no further motivation, but maybe his Driehaus will embolden classical architecture to express its creativity in the manner most honored by time, stretching back to when a beautiful Britain was a fanciful dream. Yet the dream came true. In recent decades, Britain’s beauty has fallen farther than that of Italy, as has that of America. Happily, the noble Driehaus has rediscovered its duty to help beauty rise again, at least for now.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board (dbrussat@provi- dencejournal.com). His blog is under construction at http:/brussat.com.

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